With an Icon's Death, Aspen Checks Its Inner Gonzo

By KIRK JOHNSON

Published: February 23, 2005

Over the decades that Hunter S. Thompson lived and wrote here in the high Rocky Mountains of central Colorado, Aspen became an aerie for the rich and the beautiful -- the very sort of place, right under his nose, that he was famous for fulminating against in his books. ''Freak power in the Rockies,'' as Mr. Thompson once dubbed the spirit of his adopted home, gave way to Louis Vuitton.

Mr. Thompson, meanwhile, remained exuberantly unreconstructed -- his rages and inebriated excesses apparently undiminished, his fondness for firing shotguns at night still strong and true well into his 60's. That gradually made him into the sort of person that the new, polished Aspen no longer wanted to quite encourage or celebrate.

Yet somehow the two sides -- the man and the town -- found accommodation, people here say. Like former comrades in war who have gone their separate ways, they each still saw in the other something worth trying to redeem, or perhaps to politely overlook.

Some said that Mr. Thompson's suicide on Sunday night marked the stilling of a voice that kept some of Aspen's old counterculture alive. Others said the roots that he helped establish here ran too deep and would live on without him. A few said he was a spent force in Aspen society long before his death, tolerated by those with the real power to shape the community but otherwise treated as a nostalgia act whose time would soon enough be gone.

''He was like the wild soul of the town, and the fact that he was still here, albeit with all the changes, meant a lot to a lot of people,'' said Mark Billingsley, a clerk at Explore Booksellers, a Main Street store that displayed Mr. Thompson's books by the front door on Tuesday. What Mr. Thompson's presence conveyed, Mr. Billingsley said, was affirmation and endorsement that Aspen -- appearances, costs and demographics aside -- was still Aspen after all.

''He still felt it was worthwhile to be here,'' Mr. Billingsley said.

Some people, despite the aura of loss and misty-eyed remembrance that has settled over Aspen since Mr. Thompson's death, said they never quite got it, never figured out the source of the legend, never fully understood why so many people so revered a man who mostly seemed to be simply out of control.

''I heard him speak once, and he was totally incomprehensible, to be honest,'' said Larry B. Thoreson, the sales tax administrator for the city government.

Mr. Thompson, who lived a few miles from here in a town called Woody Creek, ran for sheriff of Pitkin County in 1970 on a platform promising to change Aspen's name to Fat City and to decriminalize drugs. He almost won.

In the 1980's he raged about the pallid surrender of the counterculture spirit in his book ''Generation of Swine,'' in which he condemned the baby boomers of the 1960's -- the same boomers who in many cases now inhabit the $20 million mansions on Red Mountain overlooking Aspen. And he celebrated anarchy whenever he could, residents say, with games like Shotgun Golf, which combined traditional putting and chipping with the Thompsonesque filigree of shooting at the ball if it seemed appropriate.

Aspen, meanwhile, changed around him. Money was pouring in, and the people who wielded it were changing too. As recently as the 1980's, people say, the rich made an effort to blend in, wear jeans at the bar, become part of the community. Now, they hire townspeople to run their homes or to maintain them, and they keep mostly to themselves. Last year, the average real-estate transaction in the town surpassed $3.4 million, according to town figures.

''Anything organized probably didn't sit well with Hunter -- virtually anything with money and organization would be attacked, or parodied,'' said Aspen's city manager, Steve Barwick. ''He was one of the symbols of the no-growth argument.''

But Mr. Thompson's presence also straddled a great arc of the town's fortunes that was directly tied to the waves of cultural migration filling the town with new voices and visions. Aspen did not become wealthy and successful despite people like Mr. Thompson, many residents said, but directly because of the rejuvenation and ferment that the counterculture created.

''Aspen is a lot more settled now, and he offered a flavor of the town that has maybe disappeared a little bit,'' said Ron Morehead, the manager of Aspen Sports, who came here in the 1970's. The truth, Mr. Morehead and others said, is that the power of money in transforming the community could not be stopped by anybody, even Mr. Thompson.

''I hate to say it, but I think to them he was just a minor annoyance,'' Mr. Morehead said, referring to the developers and second-home buyers, who routinely knock down $2 million to $3 million homes to build larger, more opulent ones in their place.

Sterling Greenwood, the publisher of The Aspen Free Press -- a single-page broadsheet that proudly proclaims itself to be ''Aspen's Worst Newspaper'' -- said the fights over growth and values that have characterized Aspen's internal dialogue for decades will go on. Mr. Greenwood and his wife, Karen Day, said they came here partly because of the aura that Mr. Thompson helped create.

''He was the father of our generation here because we are all like him in some way or another,'' Ms. Day said. ''You just have to talk about what it was like in the 70's and 80's when we all first got here -- it was totally influenced by him.''

Mr. Greenwood jumped in: ''I think it still is.''

In recent years, he said, residents had risen up and forced issues that still hark, at least a little, back to the glory days of Mr. Thompson's wild-eyed vision. The town does not use snow-melting chemicals on its streets in winter, he said, because residents opposed it. A town proposal several years ago to straighten a hairpin curve and allow bigger trucks into town similarly went down to overwhelming defeat.

''Call it old Aspen or whatever you want, the people came out,'' he said.

Mr. Greenwood said that as a journalist, he carried a torch as well for the personalized journalism that Mr. Thompson helped popularize. In the 1980's, a town committee citing the ''Best of Aspen'' gave him the ''Hunter S. Thompson Junior Achievement Award.'' It still hangs on his wall.

''Sometimes I'll be writing and I'll think of a word, and I'll say, 'No, that's Hunter's word,' and I won't use it,'' Mr. Greenwood said.

''Twisted,'' for example, Mr. Greenwood said, is a classic Hunter word -- combining elements of fatigue, inebriation and a hint of the bizarre -- that should be retired like a slugger's old number.

Photos: Aspen, Colo., went glittery even as Hunter S. Thompson didn't. Yesterday, Sandra Powers, left, and Sharon Schach of Nashville shopped in town. (Photo by Michael Brands for The New York Times); Mr. Thompson, right, shown after Sheriff Bob Braudis of Pitkin County introduced him, addressed a peace rally in Aspen in 2003. (Photo by Ed Kosmicki/European Pressphoto Agency)